Category: InformaticsPage 2 of 2

Handling information about plants.

CETAF Specimen URI Tester

Back in July 2013 we held a workshop here at RBGE on the use of HTTP URIs (also known as URLs or just plain web addresses) for specimens….

First Audio Leaflet: Dawyck Scottish Trees Trail

Apps Apps Apps For several years now we have been looking for a way to make appropriate use of mobile phones to deliver interpretation material. Smart phones really…

Birds of Peramagroon: First of a series of guides?

This week saw the approval of the Birds of Peramagroon identification app in the Apple iTunes app store. It had been approved for the Google Live Android app…

Rhododendron X praecox

Despite the cold weather colour is coming into the garden.  This is Rhododendron X praecox growing by Imverleith House. The photo above was taken on an iPhone and…

Online Resources for Taxonomic Research

Names and Nomenclature When tracking down published scientific names, and their places of publication, IPNI, The Plant List and Tropicos are the three primary websites. The other listed…

Kathmandu: Software and Lunch at the Embassy

Although I trained as a botanist, picking up a PhD in Rhododendron in the 1990s, my principle role is now working with information about plants and how we…

Botanics Stories Hosting Performance

As Botanics Stories is a live site we have a third party service monitoring its performance. The two graphs below show the performance over the last thirty days….

Garden portals for Exotic Matter controlled by the Enlightened

An alien force, the Shapers, is trying to manipulate our minds by filling the world with Exotic Matter (XM) via portals associated with works of art and other…

The Top Secret Botanics Apps!

Like a lot of jobs working in software development can be depressing as you are continually dealing with things that have gone wrong and rarely dwell on the…

Another Small Cog In The Biodiversity Informatics Machine

There is a running joke in the 1990’s sitcom Friends that no one quite understands what Chandler Bing does for a living. They know it is “something to…

RBGE Collections Image Uploader – Instructions.

A step-by-step guide  to adding images to the RBGE collections  image management system.

Stable Identifiers for Specimens Workshop

On the 4th & 5th of June 2013 we held a workshop at the Botanics on using stable HTTP URIs (sometimes called URLs) for specimens. This was the…

RBGE data in new Europeana iPad App

The RBGE Collection images have been chosen as part of the initial dataset for the newly launched Europeana’s first free iPad app. ‘Europeana Open Culture’ introduces you to…

The OpenUp! Project – making RBGEs collections available through the European Cultural Portal.

The aim of the OpenUp! Project is to increase access to natural history collections by providing multimedia content (images, videos etc) to Europeana, a portal to the cultural…

CETAF – ISTC Meeting

I’m just back from a meeting I attended with Martin Pullan at the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium – hence the picture of the African…

Stable Citations for Herbarium Specimens on the Internet

After a few delays with the proofs going backwards and forwards to the publishers we have finally had our paper published in Phytotaxa. I am excited about this…